On Memorial day, while millions of Americans head for outings with friends and family, few will really take the time to remember those who died fighting for our freedoms. Fewer still will consider what it is inside of a person that drives them to put aside and sacrifice their hopes and dreams so that future generations can live in a world free of tyranny and oppression. Regardless of the underlying reasons for war, those who have braved these most unimaginable horrifying conditions that man has ever conjured must be commended and remembered for their dedication to a cause greater than themselves.

In his most recent Woodpile Report Ol’ Remus writes a must-read missive on Liberty and how societies have come to lose it, in most cases because good men did nothing. He puts forth a cautionary tale of the dangers of losing those men and women who are first to volunteer their lives for the benefit of the rest of us.

From Ol’ Remus at The Woodpile Report:

TL Davis at Washington Rebel speaks to those who believe it’s time to put their toes across the line4GW-style in this article, The Price of Propriety. But have a care. Remus offers a couple of thoughts. Take from them what you will. First, he cites England as a cautionary tale. It became the sorry, wussified place it is because the best of them were lost in the two world wars. Don’t misunderstand, brave soldiers and sailors and airmen returned from those wars, true warriors in the highest tradition of British arms. No man, ally or enemy, could say otherwise. Their adversaries over the millennia, from Agricola to Rommel, speak of their valor.

But the ones of whom Remus speaks are those few who were first off the mark, first to accept unreasonable risk, first to fall, and so their line was preferentially extinguished. Such men are born as they are. They’re one of the binaries of humanity, one is such a man or one is not such a man. There is no crossing the divide by any amount of training or will. No nation can lose these men in the numbers little England lost them and overcome future challenges to liberty, they’re too rare, almost a species apart. It is upon these men the fate of liberty relies in peacetime as well. Those few among us must prudently use that which is within them lest the fate of all shift fatally for their absence.

-The Woodpile Report (Week of May 23, 2011)

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